ietf-xml-mime
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Re: Requesting a revision of RFC3023

2003-09-19 09:50:06

In the long term, I think the fundamental problem is with the large
number of encodings, not with the encoding identifications. The
example of US-ASCII very clearly shows the huge advantages of
having a single encoding.

This will of course take some time. As one example, N3 just says
that it's in UTF-8. For other new formats, that may make sense,
too.

Regards,     Martin.

At 12:10 03/09/19 -0400, John Cowan wrote:

Francois Yergeau scripsit:

> In this respect, yes.  All programming languages should provide for charset
> identification of their source files.  Alas, none do, AFAIK.

I almost, but not quite, entirely disagree with this position.

Rather than having thousands of ad hoc mechanisms for encoding declarations
in each of the thousands of text formats now extant, file systems should have
a convenient mechanism for recording the encoding of each file, and character
processing libraries should have convenient reading and writing operations that
do the necessary conversions.  Otherwise, generic text-processing tools become
impossible, because each tool has to have a vast library that understands the
mechanics of the encoding declaration specific to the format it is trying to
read.  That way madness lies.